Filmography

No compteu amb els dits

1967

1.33:1|color - B/W|28 min

Portabella considers searching for a new type of narrative by abandoning the institutional production formula: the Aristotelian canon as the perfect tool, efficient and most adequate for producers, attested to by the success demostrated by the massive assistance of audiences in movie theatres, becoming the most popular entertainment of the 20th Century. To carry this out he had recourse to the poet, Joan Brossa. Using the technical rules for publicity films a narrative structure, Portabella's first film would be unthinkable without Joan Brossa's poetry. His play on words, his powerful visual metaphors and his fascination for traditional ways of representation, Portabella returns from exile after the "Viridiana" scandal. The first sentence in this, his first film is: "Defeated... but no vanquished". The last sequence leaves the spectator rooted in front of a blank screen.

Technical data

Producer: Films 59

Director: Pere Portabella

Script: Pere Portabella - Joan Brossa

Music: Josep Mª Mestres Quadreny

Photograpy: Luis Cuadrado

Sound: Jordi Sangenís

Script Supervisor: Anne M. Settimó

Unit Manager: Jaime Fernández Cid

Still Photographer: Manel Esteban

Special FX: Estudis Proex

Associate Producer: Andreu Puig - Anne M. Settimó

Laboratory: Fotofilm S.A.E.

Sound Studio: La voz de España

Premiere: november 17th, 1967 (Spain)

Artistic data

Multimedia

Documents

The medium-length film No conteu amb els dits, Pere Portabella's first work as a director, starts with the following phrase: "defeated, but not conquered". This may or should be taken as an allusion to the technical K.O. -see interview- taken by Portabella from Franco's regime during the sixties as regards his work as a producer. Through the extremely raging playthings of the words of Catalan poet Joan Brossa, Portabella attemptsto dismantle the forms of advertising discourse of that time in No conteu amb els dits. Even so, the director uses some characteristic traits of this discourse, such as the voice off screen, the brief duration or use of the human body as the reflection of the "ideal" aesthetics of the product; the nexus of these advertising dogmas will be the grounds for using the cinematic speeds with which Portabella breaks sound and image barriers, intentionally, pagan.

Any of the twenty-eight fragments which form the unity of No conteu amb els dits not only electrifies and overloads the traditional advertising forms, but endows these with a power which, all together, rules out the value of the content by the absurd and increases the visual power of the iconography being used. A similar process can be seen in a recent film: Zoolander. Although in matters of form and affection Ben Stiller's film stands poles apart from Portabella's dry experimental nature, it nevertheless plunged into the publicity discourse of its time and showed up the violence, nonsense and potential bestiality of this. In both cases, both in Pere Portabella and Ben Stiller, there would seem to be a despair, an enormous desire for this world, which they know how to empty of content and fill with a strange beauty (Pere Portabella) or strange love (Ben Stiller), to appear like another world. No conteu amb els dits ends up with the blank screen announcing its cinematographic and thus infinite status; Zoolander ends up with an aerial shot burying Ben Stiller's Utopia in the middle of a metropolis. Both types of cinema know they are defeated - but not conquered.